Free Focused Scroll

29-Oct-2006

Trackpad driver for recent Apple laptops.

Free Focused Scroll is a project to implement an open source driver for Apple PowerBooks. The project was started as an alternative to SideTrack (which isn't free) and an improvement upon iScroll2. It achieves its advanced features by running the trackpad in what is called 'absolute' mode. This means that the driver can tell exactly what part of the pad your finger is touching. The Apple driver (and iScroll2) both run the pad in 'relative' mode, and while that facilitates a simpler driver because the pad does most of the work, it is very limiting of what you can do.

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Free Focused Scroll is a project to implement an open source driver for Apple PowerBooks. The project was started as an alternative to SideTrack (which isn't free) and an improvement upon iScroll2. It achieves its advanced features by running the trackpad in what is called 'absolute' mode. This means that the driver can tell exactly what part of the pad your finger is touching. The Apple driver (and iScroll2) both run the pad in 'relative' mode, and while that facilitates a simpler driver because the pad does most of the work, it is very limiting of what you can do.

Most notably running in 'absolute' mode allows the driver:

Two-finger scrolling like the new Apple laptops with the new USB trackpads;

Linear scroll regions that can be placed anywhere. This adds the functionality of a scroll-wheel;

Hotspots to bind taps in the corners of the trackpad to alternate mouse buttons;

Ability to remap the physical button to perform any type of mouse click.

The driver is NOT designed for use with the new 2005 PowerBooks nor is it based upon the newer driver for them. It is entirely based upon the original Darwin ADB trackpad driver with the information for how to activate `absolute' mode taken from the ScrollPad project. The preferences daemon and the two-finger scrolling code is taken from the iScroll2 project as we didn't really want to reinvent the whole wheel. At some point we intend to remove the iScroll2 scroll code, though. We believe it is possible to make the code much better if it utilises absolute coordinate information instead of just relative movement.

Do not worry about installing this driver, though. The installer will only allow it to be installed on compatible Macs and the uninstaller is pretty foolproof. Plus it's small!

Version 0.7:

In addition to the installer having a new fancy icon, I've cleaned the code up a bit and disabled quite a bit of debugging code.